'Hidden Scars': Stanley Greene retrospective exhibit opens in Paris

Born in New York in 1949, Stanley Greene, a former member of the Black Panthers, studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. The city, then the stronghold of the new underground punk scene, became his first love. "The Western Front", his earliest personal diary, is composed of sequences of images that follow one another frenetically, echoing the feelings of urgency experienced by the anarchic youth.To protect himself from self-destructive tendencies, Greene left San Francisco in the mid-eighties for New York before moving to Paris. A fashion photographer at first, he turned to conflict photography in 1989, after he immortalized the fall of the Berlin Wall with his now famous shot "Kisses to All, Berlin Wall".Throughout the past twenty-five years, Stanley Greene has been to the most dangerous and devastated places in the world, such as Sudan, Kashmir, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti. His heart-wrenching work on the crisis in Chechnya was rewarded with the W. Eugene Smith Award in 2004.A reporter with a unique style, Stanley Greene argues for a return to the committed photo essay: he does not simply inform, he tells a story and denounces a situation. The exhibition "Hidden Scars" is a retrospective constructed from a selection of six essays. Its aim is to retrace the path, at times treacherous, followed by the American photographer.Polka Galerie is proud to show important pieces of his exceptional production, from the first photos he took in San Francisco to the color images shot in Chechnya in late 2013, thus demonstrating, that Stanley Greene is no ordinary photographer. (polkagalerie.com)

'Hidden Scars' is on exhibit at the Polka Galerie in Paris from March 22 - May 24, 2014.